Staff Software Engineer, Builders

EvenUp is on a mission to close the justice gap using technology and AI. As a Staff Engineer on our Builders team, you'll lead complex technical investigations and drive architectural improvements, serving as a crucial technical bridge within the engineering department.

Responsibilities:

• Lead technical resolution of the most complex, multi-system escalations — the ones that require deep cross-functional understanding and careful architectural thinking
• Identify systemic weaknesses across the product that generate escalations and partner with other engineering teams to address them at the root
• Define and drive the technical strategy for the squad: observability, tooling, runbooks, incident response patterns, and reliability standards
• Partner closely with the CPO and EM to shape the squad's roadmap, balancing urgent reactive work with high-leverage proactive investments
• Serve as a technical advisor and force multiplier for other engineers on the squad — reviewing approaches, accelerating investigations, and raising the ceiling on what the team can handle
• Influence engineering culture and practices across EvenUp: blameless post-mortems, on-call hygiene, failure mode documentation
• Act as a product thinker for the squad — synthesizing patterns from escalations into product insights, shaping what the team builds proactively, and making sound scope decisions without PM support
• Engage directly with key customers or CS leadership when escalations require deep technical credibility at the table

Requirements:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record at the Staff level or equivalent
• Exceptional diagnostic and systems-thinking skills — you can hold the complexity of a multi-service architecture in your head and find the failure point others miss
• Deep technical credibility: you can write and review code, design systems, and make sound architectural trade-offs under time pressure
• Experience driving improvements across team boundaries — you influence without authority and get other teams to own their part of the fix
• Strong communication skills with engineers, product leaders, and non-technical stakeholders
• A bias toward permanent fixes over repeated patches — you've built things that made whole categories of problems go away
• Deeply product-minded: you understand the 'why' behind customer pain, not just the 'what,' and you're as comfortable making product decisions as you are architectural ones
• Experience at a high-growth SaaS company navigating rapid product evolution
• Experience building or leading reliability engineering, SRE, or platform functions at a growing company
• Deep familiarity with AI/ML product systems and the failure modes they introduce (data quality, model drift, pipeline failures, etc.)
• Experience working in regulated industries or with enterprise customers who have high SLA expectations
• Prior background in incident command or escalation management frameworks